Yearbook of the Association of Pacific Coast Geographers

Architecture and Geography: Toward a Mutual Concern for Space and Place Larry R. Ford* Call it architecture, call it history, call it landscape, or call it boosterism; regardless of what name it goes under, the built environment is becoming increasingly important in the popular literature. A visit to any bookstore in almost any city will lead you to piles of books entiüed, "The Historic Architecture of ....."or "The Beautiful Neighborhoods of . . .,"as well as an ever-growing assortment of books on bridges, diners, skyscrapers, and bungalows. Many of these books are of the fluffy "coffee table" variety with more pretty pictures than serious content, yet a number of very sophisticated books on the meaning of architecture, such as Building the Dream by Gwendolyn Wright and Skylines by Wayne Attoe, are also making an impact. The purpose of this paper is to review the involvement geographers have had with the study of architecture over time, and to encourage the discipline of geography not to abandon this long-standing traditional interest now that it finally seems to have caught the public's attention. In addition, this paper will try to provide some framework and direction for the geographic study of architecture. Geographers have been interested in architecture—although this sometimes has been subsumed under the heading of "settlement" —for at least 100 years. Indeed, nineteenth century European geographers, such as Meitzen and Schlüter in Germany, examined * Dr. Ford is a professor of geography, San Diego State University. His presidential address was delivered at the annual banquet of the Association, Eureka, California, September 24, 1983. 8 ASSOCIATION OF PACIFIC COAST GEOGRAPHERS both urban and rural housetypes, as well as settlement form. Gradually, however, interest in architecture per se lost out to the study of settlement form and regional delimitation, and what interest in architecture remained tended to focus almost exclusively on the rural folk landscape. The French, led by Jean Brunhes, were especially insistent that only rural dwellings were representative of the undiluted cultural character of the people and landscape. By the early twentieth century, American geographers also were involved with the study of architectural forms. In their paper "Outline for Fieldwork in Geography" Jones and Sauer (1915) recommended inventorying the architecture, construction materials, furnishings, and conditions of buildings as an important component of the description of the characteristics of people. A few important and provocative papers appeared about the same time, such as Mears' study of sod houses on the Great Plains and Van Cleefs (1918) examination of housetypes in the Finnish community of northern Minnesota. During the 1920s, interest in the built environment increased rapidly. The majority of studies, however, were primarily regional geographies that featured "typical" architecture more or less in passing. Most were articles in the style of National Geographic that aimed at providing an overall view of places such as the Aran Islands or the Gaspé Peninsula. Still, architecture was a major element in many of these articles and often helped to flesh out topics that might otherwise have been dry and encyclopedic. This "typical building" tradition is one which geographers should not abandon too readily. After all, many people read National Geographic for the same reason that they read P^yboy, that is, to see places they will never have the opportunity to visit in person. A picture can be worth a thousand words, even if the topic is something like "Structuralist Views of the Post-Industrial Conurbation." As the 1920s progressed into the 1930s, the "typical building" phase of architectural geography gave way to more focused concern for certain types of architecture. Two unfortunate trends became ingrained during these years that may have stymied the growth of the field later. One was the almost total emphasis on rural (especially folk) landscapes and the other was preference for the study of exotic YEARBOOK · VOLUME 46 · 19849 foreign architectural forms. Articles focused on Brazil, North Africa, Italy, and Mongolia, increasingly emphasizing the remarkable and unusual rather than the typical. While many of these articles were quite interesting, such as Fuller and Clapp's (1924) study of loess dwellings in China (loess is more?) and Waterman's (1924) paper on North American Indian houses, architectural geography became...